Fox News distorts, derides

Cliven Bundy, another of Fox News' good old boy heroes — you know the ones who cling to their guns and ache to overthrow the U.S. government — is also, it would appear, a racist.

"They abort their young children; they put their young men in jail because they never learned how to pick cotton," Bundy, a rancher who has been grazing his cattle illegally on federal lands for years, and who owes the government more than $1 million in grazing fees, said last week in a monologue on "the Negro."

"And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy."

This should surprise no one.

We have heard similar sentiments from other Fox News darlings. But how many Cliven Bundys must Fox News embrace and promote before we recognized its unvarnished repulsion to truth and ethics in journalism.

Fox's dangerously unbalanced and agenda-driven operation is too broad to sum up here, but you will more than get the picture if I were to compare how one of its stars, Sean Hannity, dealt differently with a black man toting a Bible and a white man backed by militias.

In 2008, Hannity, in his relentless bid to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, isolated three words (God Damn America) from an old and lengthy sermon of Mr. Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and played them ad nauseam throughout the campaign.

Hannity contended that the pastor's remarks showed Mr. Obama to be unpatriotic, if not overtly, certainly clearly in his consorting with Rev. Wright.

In the sermon titled "Confusing God and Government," Rev. Wright said people under oppression often confused God for government, giving as examples Muslims who practice jihad, the Christians who conducted crusades, and the coalition of the willing that former President Bush led in his shock-and-awe regime change in Iraq. In that sermon, Rev. Wright also spoke about this country's "indecent" treatment of Native Americans, and Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.

As to its African-Americans citizens, the reverend noted that the government "put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in the cotton fields, and put them in inferior schools and substandard housing…"

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strikes law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no. Not 'God Bless America', God Damn America…for killing innocent people…for treating her citizens as less than human."

However, you feel about Rev. Wright's sermon, a case can be made that his rhetoric does not rise to the same seditious level as the actions of Bundy, who doesn't "recognize the United States government as even existing."

And after losing at every level in the courts in his attempt to steal federal lands, Bundy has surrounded himself with hundreds of armed militia supporters, threatening civil war against the federal government.

This is the man Hannity has spent hours on the Fox Network promoting as a patriot and as someone to whom the government should surrender.

"The government needs to stand down," Hannity said in one interview with Bundy.

"…This is only a symptom of how one person, standing up to the government, I'm telling you, [it is] my opinion that this crisis could come to a head, and lives could be lost."

Yes, Bundy is a nut, and even a racist, but I wouldn't fret too much about him. He is merely a symptom of one of the sicknesses that is Hannity and Fox News.